Communication Methods

Communication Methods
Effective communication skills are one of the fundamental to success to many aspects of life.  Many jobs require strong communication skills and people with good communication skills usually enjoy better interpersonal relationships with friends and family. Effective communication is a key interpersonal skill and learning how we can improve our communication has many benefits they say Communication is a two way process, so improving communication involves both how we send and receive messages.

Communication is one of the essential factors needed for a Business Analyst which plays a vital role in documenting the needs and analyzing the requirements of a stake holder and also understanding what exactly are the needs of business are and how different strategies can be implemented in the levels of department to get the tasks done. Since every Business Analyst acts as a client interface in a project, there are few communication techniques and methods that need to be adopted. These methods play a crucial role in defining the project scope. But, what exactly is communications? It is more than the words we use. Good or effective communications combines a skill set that includes verbal and non-verbal capabilities and as a professional and it is imperative that we become a communication master.

Apart from various methods like verbal and non-verbal communications there are various techniques that business analyst use to maintain communication in the form of diagrams which can be explained as follows.
Use case diagram – The Use case diagram includes systems, actors, Use cases and relationships.  It has to show the system or the application. Then it shows the people, organizations or other systems that interact with it and finally it shows the basic flow of what the system or the application does.
Activity diagram – It is made to understand the flow of activities from systems perspective .It is a flow chart, which elaborates various activities performed from the system point of view  as what the system does and what are the activities it performs.

A Business Analyst’s job is to draw out the requirements from the Business Users and communicating the same to Developers and Testers. Thus, there are several methods in which a BA will communicate to these Business Users. These methods are called Requirement Elicitation Techniques.The requirement elicitation techniques can be described as follows they are Brainstorming, Document Analysis, Workshop, Observation , Reverse Engineering. JAD (Joint Application Development), Interview, Questionnaire and prototyping.

In case the Business Users are not available for the discussion on requirements, a Questionnaire is sent to the users they have to make sure that the queries in Questionnaire are addressed within specified time range and the requirements are understood well by the BA and then BA prepares a prototype of the given product and the same is provided to stakeholders to give a clear picture on the look and feel of the product.